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Veterans will be sharing their thoughts on war, peace, and pretty much everything in between.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Eaten Alive

By Saje Williams

Most of us are struggling, trying to pay the rent or mortgage, utilities, telephone bills, internet access, pay down student loans, child support, insurance payments for health, auto, and even home, not to mention incidentals like groceries, fuel, and other sundries. And we are taxed for every cent of it. Sometimes twice.

We were promised the chance to work hard to rise above the fray, to have enough money to stock away for a rainy day, or for our retirement. But we find that we've been leveraged into a corner. People have made millions by selling us things on credit, with interest rates nothing short of usury, and we are blamed for any bump in the road that throws us off course.

Insurance companies check our credit ratings to raise our rates, employers check credit ratings to gauge our fitness for employment, and, all the while, the people who are taking advantage of every legal loophole to evade paying their fair share are living in opulent luxury, migrating from a loft apartment in New York City to a summer villa in the south of France and looking down their noses at us peons even while they feed on our labor and our hard-earned money.

They send their minions to congress with pockets full of money, to argue for even MORE loopholes, even more ways to feed off our energy, while the politicians promise us relief in exchange for our votes. We give everything we have to keep this nation going, every dime to keep the economic engine moving forward, and they ride us like beasts of burden giving us as little as they possibly can in exchange.

Are we angry? Damn right we're angry. We're angry because we're lied to, ripped off, cheated by the system, and half of our alleged representatives don't even seem to give a damn. We're leaving a damaged world to our children and our children's children, all because those with the money and influence have made it their life's work to suck as much from the planet as they have from us, leaving behind only toxic wastes to show where life once existed.

They send our jobs overseas, and pay tycoons in other places portions of our money to force others into slave labor to send us shoddy, often toxic products. And we're constantly bombarded with mind-numbing advertisements that tell us to buy, buy, buy, even if we have to put ourselves into hock up to our eyeballs to do it.

Angry? How about pissed off? How about mad as hell?

They're parasites. A lot of them only give back because they get kickbacks from the government for doing so. Not out of the goodness of their tiny hearts, but because, in the end, it evens out. They give with one hand and take it back with the other.

It's a wonder they don't explode when sunlight hits them.

They send our children off to fight their wars, all the while making a profit from the experience, and return them (the ones who make it out alive) maimed in either body or mind, or both, then discard them as useless once they can no longer be of service. Twenty five percent of the homeless population of the U.S. is made up of those who were sent to fight and it's beneath them to do what they can to alleviate their suffering.

They live to feed off our energy. And you know what's worse? We continue to let them. We go so far as to mock those who tell us the truth about it all.

And we should damn well know better.

Posted in full with author's permission.

Originally posted at democraticunderground.com: http://tinyurl.com/37sqsp